As an important part of pretreatment before recycling, sorting has a great impact on the quality, efficiency, cost and difficulty of recycling. In this paper, dual-energy X-ray transmission (DE-XRT) combined with variable gas-ejection is used to improve the quality and efficiency of in-line automatic sorting of waste non-ferrous metals. A method was proposed to judge the sorting ability, identify the types, and calculate the mass and center-of-gravity coordinates according to the shading of low-energy, the line scan direction coordinate and transparency natural logarithm ratio of low energy to high energy (R_value). The material identification was satisfied by the nearest neighbor algorithm of effective points in the material range to the R_value calibration surface. The flow-process of identification was also presented. Based on the thickness of the calibration surface, the material mass and center-of-gravity coordinates were calculated. The feasibility of controlling material falling points by variable gas-ejection was analyzed. The experimental verification of self-made materials showed that identification accuracy by count basis was 85%, mass and center-of-gravity coordinates calculation errors were both below 5%. The method proposed features high accuracy, high efficiency, and low operation cost and is of great application value even to other solid waste sorting, such as plastics, glass and ceramics.
Qualification and performance of the Low-Energy X-ray Reflectometer (LEXR)